Structured Data for Small Business Sites

10 March 2026 SEO & Structured Data

Structured data is one of those SEO topics that sounds more intimidating than it is. At its core, it's just a standard vocabulary — Schema.org — for describing what's actually on a page in a format machines can parse reliably, rather than making a search engine guess from prose.

What it actually does

Structured data doesn't directly boost rankings the way better content or backlinks might. What it does is remove ambiguity: it tells a search engine, unambiguously, "this is a business, here's its opening hours, here's its phone number" or "this is a review, and here's the rating out of five" rather than leaving it to infer that from surrounding text. That clarity is what unlocks rich results — star ratings, opening hours, breadcrumb trails and FAQ dropdowns showing up directly in search results — which tend to improve click-through rate even without a ranking change.

The formats, briefly

Schema.org markup can be embedded three ways: inline with itemscope/itemprop attributes (microdata), inline with property attributes (RDFa), or as a separate <script type="application/ld+json"> block containing plain JSON. JSON-LD has become the standard recommendation from Google specifically because it's decoupled from your HTML — you can generate it from your CMS data without touching your markup, and it doesn't clutter your templates with extra attributes.

The types worth prioritising for a small business site

• LocalBusiness (or a more specific subtype, if one exists for your industry) — name, address, phone number, opening hours, and the geographic area you serve.
• Person — useful for a freelancer or consultant site where the individual is the brand.
• Service / Offer — a structured list of what you actually do, rather than a paragraph a search engine has to interpret.
• BreadcrumbList — describes your site's navigation hierarchy, and often shows up directly in search results in place of a raw URL.
• FAQPage — if you have a genuine FAQ section, this is one of the more reliable ways to earn extra visible space in search results, with individual questions expandable right there in the results page.
• Review / AggregateRating — only if you have real, genuine reviews to reference. Fabricating ratings here is a policy violation, not just bad practice.

A minimal example

A simple LocalBusiness block looks something like this — plain JSON, dropped into a script tag, no changes needed to the visible page:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Example Ltd",
  "telephone": "01234 567890",
  "areaServed": "United Kingdom",
  "url": "https://example.co.uk"
}
</script>

Keep it honest and keep it current

Structured data is a promise to search engines about what's actually on the page. Marking up content that isn't visibly present, or that's gone stale (old opening hours, a phone number that's changed), risks manual action from Google rather than the rich result you were hoping for. Whatever you mark up should match what a visitor genuinely sees.

Validate before you ship it

Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator will both flag missing required properties and outright syntax errors before anything goes live. It's a five-minute check that avoids silently broken markup sitting on your site for months unnoticed.

← Back to the blog